The trial of Anne Boleyn becomes, in Margaret Pole’s account, a decisive display of how royal power could redirect a legal proceeding and make a politically useful verdict appear inevitable. Lord Montague and other peers thought they had agreed to examine the king’s marriage; instead, they were summoned to judge the queen and men accused alongside her. Margaret depicts a jury divided by allegiance, evidence shaped by Thomas Cromwell, and a verdict that led not to the queen’s removal or confinement but to her death.

Background: a court and church transformed

The trial followed years in which the authority to define marriage, succession, and the Church had become a struggle between the king and other sources of judgment. At the court masque, Anne had already disrupted the visible order of precedence: after the queen rose to leave, Anne remained among the dancers, and neither the queen nor the king made her withdraw. Margaret understood the moment as a public change in the balance of courtly power. Anne’s position, once strikingly displayed in ceremony, would later be tested in a proceeding that also depended on who controlled the rules and the account of events.

The broader constitutional change is made explicit when Lord Montague reports that the Church has surrendered to Henry VIII. The king, he tells Margaret and Princess Mary, will rule the Church himself, while the Pope is to be disregarded in England. Thomas More has resigned as Lord Chancellor and returned home. Margaret recognizes that her friend has lost an ally and that Henry has lost a man willing to tell him the truth. The conflict is not only over the queen’s status: it concerns who may authoritatively decide what counts as lawful and true.

That uncertainty shapes the succession oath imposed on the peers at Westminster in spring 1534. Thomas Cromwell, now Lord Chancellor, summons them to swear to the king’s settlement. Margaret recalls that the Pope had publicly ruled the marriage of Queen Katherine and Henry valid, while Henry claimed authority to decide otherwise. Thomas More refuses the oath as written, offering to sign a revised version but not one that violates his conscience. Henry had promised More he would not put him to this test, yet broke that promise. By the time the peers are drawn into the later case against Anne, the breach between royal command, religious judgment, and personal conscience is already established.

From a marriage inquiry to a criminal trial

Lord Montague’s first account of the arrests reaches Margaret in distress. Anne has been arrested for adultery, along with men of her court accused of keeping her secrets. Among those arrested are Thomas Wyatt, Henry Norris, the young musician who serves in Anne’s chamber, and her brother George Boleyn. The range of those detained alarms Montague: rather than quietly set Anne aside, the king has made the accusations public and extended them to people around her.

The summons to the jury exposes a more consequential reversal. Montague says that he and the others who met with Cromwell had agreed to help secure the annulment of the king’s marriage. They understood the task to be an inquiry into the validity of the marriage vows. Instead, they are ordered to try Anne for adultery, together with her brother and other men. Margaret’s questions make the substitution plain: the proceeding is not, as she first assumes, another attempt to annul a marriage. It is a trial of the woman herself.

Montague is not the only peer caught in that change of purpose. Twenty-five other peers must sit in judgment alongside him. Margaret describes the panel as chaired by Anne’s uncle, Thomas Howard, who had helped place her on the throne but now presides over her fall. Henry Percy, Anne’s former lover, is also present, unwell and protesting that he should not be compelled to attend. These relationships place the jurors inside the history of Anne’s rise and the king’s court, rather than outside it as detached arbiters.

The jury, its allegiances, and the evidence

Margaret emphasizes that a substantial part of the panel belongs to her family’s affinity or political party. They support Princess Mary and have long hated Anne for taking the queen’s place. The accusations therefore meet an audience already disposed against the accused. The remainder, in Margaret’s description, are Henry’s men, whose loyalties depend on what the king commands. She sees no realistic prospect of a neutral judgment: Anne has made few friends, no one speaks for her, and the evidence has been persuasively prepared by Cromwell.

The material presented to the panel does not appear to Margaret as a coherent account. Elizabeth Somerset, Countess of Worcester, who had attended Queen Katherine’s funeral with Margaret, turns against Anne and reports flirtations and worse in the queen’s bedchamber. Other claims rest on what someone supposedly said on a deathbed. Margaret characterizes the assembled material as petty gossip and grotesque scandal, and the account makes clear how rumor could enter a formal proceeding as evidence against a politically isolated defendant.

The case also includes a startling claim by George Boleyn: he tells the court that Henry VIII was incapable of fathering a child. Montague cannot explain why Cromwell allowed the statement to be made publicly. Margaret asks whether the panel proved that Anne murdered the queen; Montague answers that the murder was accused, not demonstrated. The accusations also include a supposed plan to poison the queen and Princess Mary. In Margaret’s telling, the charge itself is treated as confirmation of the family’s suspicions, although the account supplies no independent proof of it.

Verdict and consequences

Despite Montague’s misgivings about the proceeding, he votes Anne guilty. He tells Margaret that the evidence was presented as inarguable and that Cromwell had anticipated details the jurors might question. His decision does not resolve the doubts that surround the case. The jury has been assembled from men with political interests, the charge has shifted from the king’s marriage to Anne’s alleged crimes, and the material includes reports Margaret regards as gossip. The formal verdict and the narrator’s account of its conditions remain in sharp tension.

The result is not confinement or removal to a religious house. Montague tells Margaret that Henry intends to kill Anne. The threatened punishment marks the end of the process Margaret has watched unfold: first the queen’s public elevation, then her arrest with members of her household, then a trial in which her political opponents sit among her judges. Margaret leaves London in May 1536 because she cannot bear the speculation and repeated retelling of the scandal. Even people who had opposed Anne, she observes, cannot understand why Henry does not simply annul the marriage and send her away. The trial thus appears not as a necessary settlement of disputed law, but as a sudden, deadly extension of the king’s power.